Remembering Rajiv Dutta, Veteran of EBay and Elevation

Rajiv Dutta, a veteran Silicon Valley executive and investor, died Monday morning after battling a recurrence of cancer.

eBay Inc.

Rajiv Dutta

Dutta, 49 years old, was eBay’s chief financial officer during its headiest growth period and later ran its PayPal and Skype divisions. He was most recently a partner at the private equity firm Elevation Partners. Dutta died at a Stanford University hospital after checking into the facility last week.

Word of Dutta’s death began spreading quickly on Monday on Facebook among his friends and former colleagues. Last summer Dutta discovered that the colon cancer from which he had earlier suffered had returned and spread to other parts of his body and began a round of chemotherapy that proved unable to stop the disease, said Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO and Republican candidate for governor of California.

Whitman, in a telphone interview, said she worked in adjacent cubicles with Dutta for ten years at eBay and considered him one of her closest and dearest work colleagues and personal friends.

“You won’t find anyone with anything bad to say about Rajiv,” she said. “He was a prince-of-a-guy. I will miss him terribly. I miss him already.”

“Rajiv was a man of the highest integrity, intellect, compassion, and energy,” Anderson said. “Those of us who were lucky enough to know him embraced his beautiful spirit and his incredible enthusiasm for life. He was an inspiration to all of us at the firm and he will be missed. We want to extend our condolences to his wife Sumita and to his entire family.”